Building Cultures of Excellence Instead of Perfection
Recently, I had the opportunity to travel through beautiful Vermont. My wife and I were there to hike and take in the colorful fall foliage. While the leaves are great, any good trip to Vermont must also include a visit to the Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory. Nothing says vacation like ice cream at 10:00 in the morning!
What’s really special about Ben and Jerry’s though, is how publicly they acknowledge both their successes and their failures.
With a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State University and a $12,000 investment, Ben and Jerry opened their first ice cream scoop shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont in 1978. Today, Ben and Jerry’s is a billion dollar company guided by a progressive mission and equity-based core values: advance human rights and dignity, support social and economic justice for historically marginalized communities, and protect and restore the Earth’s natural systems. In other words, they are using ice cream to positively change the world.
There are many factors that make Ben and Jerry’s a unique company. They source products that promote supplier diversity, they use regenerative agriculture practices, and they utilize creative environmental practices that limit the impact on the climate. But that’s not all. Outside the factory, a graveyard stands complete with granite tombstones, of deceased flavors such as Cow Power, Peanut Butter and Jelly, and Chocolate Macadamia. There are over 35 deceased flavors. As I was wandering through their graveyard, it got me thinking:
“Here’s a highly successful company in a competitive market, publicly acknowledging and honoring their failures – what might it look like if more of us did that?”
In my previous roles as a school principal and school district superintendent, some of those around me had a much different view of failure. Mistakes were viewed as a deficiency in our people and/or our systems. In some cases, failures were called out publicly as a means to further raise expectations and ensure those errors never occurred again. The expectation was one of perfection, a state of being that I believe is rarely achieved, let alone consistently maintained.
While there are certainly some benefits of a culture of perfection there are far more detriments to this type of culture for both a company and an individual.
Despite the focus on high quality products, innovation, and attention to detail they encourage, perfectionist tendencies have also been tied to decreased productivity (such as spending excessive time on tasks, which leads to less productivity), employee stress and burnout, inflexibility (rigid thinking and an unwillingness to adapt to change), and missed opportunities (an unwillingness to take risks).
By my nature, I have strong perfectionist tendencies, and this list of benefits and weaknesses of perfectionism could have been used to describe me. It could have also been used to describe our school district. Due to the expectation of perfection held by some of those around me, and to some degree from me in wanting to meet those expectations, we became a district that at times avoided taking risks.
My leadership team was frequently stressed as we at times operated from a perspective of fear versus being creative and willing to push and challenge the status quo.
This is what I appreciate about Ben and Jerry’s approach. They have high expectations for every step in the development of their excellent ice cream (from ingredients to product testing to marketing), but even with those expectations and a lot of hard work, some flavors end up in the ice cream graveyard. They embrace (and almost celebrate) the fact that not every effort will lead to a perfect outcome.
What Ben and Jerry’s has done is to create a culture of excellence: high standards, continuous improvement, and exceptional performance.
After some tough conversations with some members of our board and a lot of personal self-reflection, it was this mindset that I strived to build in North Clackamas. Excellence should be defined by:
High standards
Continuous improvement
Accountability
Innovation and creativity
Collaboration and teamwork
Learning from failure
Leadership role modeling
When we focus on excellence we continue to learn, grow, and improve. Those attributes foster innovation and lead to high levels of performance and quality in a healthy and supportive community.